blog.foosion.org

Parse HTML the Groovy way

Posted by thomas - 09/06/08 at 05:06:53 pm

In the last couple of weeks I often had to download a lot of files, submitted to a web-based teaching platform. Downloading all these files by hand is very annoying so I implemented a short Groovy script. Since Groovy has a great support for parsing well-formed XML-like information it fails if you want to parse unstructured and nasty HTML code.

At last I searched for a Java library containing an HTML-parsers and I found TagSoup. This is a SAX-compliant HTML-parser specialized in re-formating and cleaning up faulty HTML code.

This is <B>bold, <I>bold italic, </b>italic, </i>normal text

will be rewritten to

This is <b>bold, <i>bold italic, </i></b><i>italic, </i>normal text.

One advantage of TagSoup is the Xpath-like query mechanism. It parses the HTML code and generates an object structure representing this content. Now the user can access the single elements. One possible example could be:

def slurper = new XmlSlurper(new org.ccil.cowan.tagsoup.Parser())
html = slurper.parse("an_example_file.html")
table = html.body.div.find{ it.@id == "content" }.form.table.
find{ it.@id == "attempts" }

This retrieves the table “attempts” placed inside a form in the div “content”. The method findAll() will retrieve all elements for a given attribute or with given child elements.

After all I fell in love with TagSoup. It saves a lot of work when you have to access HTML content of websites, portals or similar, which are not able to send a XHTML 1.x compliant responses. But this is an other topic .

Fancy Zoom

Posted by Nils - 10/02/08 at 05:02:03 pm

Fancy Zoom is a great way of adding zoom capabilities to your website in a blink of an eye.
Javascript powered and cross-browser compatible.

Have a look at the demo-site!

To add fancy zoom to your site do the following easy steps:

1. Download Fancy Zoom over at cabel’s place
2. add upload the contents of the package to your webroot
3. add the following javascript files to your html pages:



4. enable the body to load the neccesary javascript stuff:



and you’re done!
from now on, every link to an image becomes zoomed. Even text-links to images!

thank you cabel for this great addition!

- Nils

Theme updates

Posted by Nils - 25/01/08 at 09:01:52 pm

first geekery! *hooray*

also bevor man hier überhaupt ANFANGEN kann zu bloggen musste erstmal das Theme auf den aktuellsten hip-web-zwonull-mega-standard gebracht werden. Einmal mit Profis arbeiten ne?!

Falls jemand ‘mal von seinem Wordpress die Meldung bekommen sollte “Your theme is not widgetized” der folge einfach folgenden einfachen Anweisungen:

Eure sidebar sieht wahrscheinlich etwa so aus:

• ..blabla

• ..blabla

• Blogroll

  Um jetzt Wordpress’ großartige “Widget” Funktion einzubauen, fügt man folgendes einfach in die sidebar ein:

  
|| !dynamic_sidebar() ) ?>


  und legt (falls nicht vorhanden) die datei functions.php im Theme-Verzeichnis an:

  
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar();
?>


  letztere teilt Wordpress mit, dass die sidebar Widgets unterstützt.

  Von nun an, kann man unter “Presentation -> Widgets” einfach per drag and drop die sidebar konfigurieren, wie hier in unserem Fall zum Beispiel mit der wunderschönen, noch sehr leeren Tag Cloud.

  cheers, Nils

  January 25, 2008 | 1 Comment